Участь державної влади в утвердженні автокефалії помісних православних Церков: богословське та історико-канонічне обґрунтування

Анотація

У статті проаналізовано першоджерела християнської богословської думки, канонічні правила, церковні документи та історичні прецеденти як джерела канонічного права щодо участі державної влади в утвердженні автокефалії помісних Церков. Із позицій православного богослів’я, церковної історії та церковного права обґрунтовано й доведено можливість участі державної влади в утвердженні незалежності місцевих Православних Церков.

The article raises topical issues of the modern structure of the Orthodox Church, namely the constitution of new autocephalous Local Orthodox Churches. The purpose of the publication is to solve an important scientific problem: whether the government can participate in the acquisition and establishment of the autocephalous status of the Local Church. If so, in what way, and does it have a proper theological and historicalcanonical justification? The answers to this question were found in the Holy Scriptures, the original sources of early Christian theological thought, canonical rules, documents, world and church history, scientific works on this topic. According to Orthodox theology, the state is a God-ordained organization of society. The Church, as a divinehuman organism, institutionally arose in the state and continued to exist in it, gradually adopting models of secular administrative and territorial division. We trace this process in the books of the New Testament Scriptures, an early Christian tradition reflected in the writings of the main representatives of the patriarchal thought. In the era of the Ecumenical Councils, the donor normative tradition of the Church of Christ, tested during the first 3 centuries of Christian history, was used as a basis in the law-making activities of the Church (Apostolic Rules, Canons of Ecumenical and Local Councils, Rules of the Holy Fathers). Thus, the canonical rules of the Church for the state determined the further prospect of influencing the church organization both at the level of dioceses and at the level of autocephalous Local Churches. Analyzing the history of church organization after the Ecumenical Councils, we find that the emergence of independent Local Churches was associated with the emergence of new states, and the recognition of autocephaly was supported by their governments. However, the participation of public authorities in these processes was not the same and to reflect the differences in approaches, it is conditionally classified into three types:
• indirecting (declarationof independence, ie the emergence of the state, which was the reason for the request for autocephaly, in accordance with the church canons on the correspondence between state and church administrative systems);
• direct (proclamation of the autocephaly of the local Church by state regulations);
• mediation (appeal of the first persons and higher bodies of state power to the Mother Church to grant autocephaly to the local Orthodox Church.

The applied classification made it possible to determine that of all three types of participation of state power in establishing the autocephaly of the local Church, the mediation model was correct and the most effective. Addressing the Mother Church, the state authorities expressed the will of the whole people, not individuals. Thus, without exceeding its authority and without trying to ensure what it does not have, through the state, the state power avoided a passive position, when the existence of the state was not enough to form an autocephalous church. In addition, the canons of the Church attribute to the state authority to care for the Church of Christ. The volumes of many modern Local Orthodox Churches state that autocephaly is granted to the Orthodox Church in the territory of an independent state, and also mention state power or its main representatives. Thus, in the absence of a clearly defined procedure in the Ecumenical Orthodoxy for granting autocephaly, the participation of state authorities in asserting the independence of the Local Church is quite justified and logical. It also has theological and canonical foundations, which are engraved in the Christian tradition, theological thought, church rules, documents and historical precedents.